Oil search is­sues raised

boun­ti­ful Taranaki Basin, where the Maui A gas well has pro­duced nat­u­ral gas for 35 years.

The well is in just 110m of wa­ter, far shal­lower than the pro­posed depths in the Pe­ga­sus rang­ing from 800-3000m deep.

Many peo­ple, in­clud­ing lo­cal business and iwi lead­ers have ex­pressed their doubt that the Gov­ern­ment had the nec­es­sary re­sources to deal with an oil spill or leak of any sig­nif­i­cance, a fact agreed upon by all sides.

Bridges has stressed that com­pa­nies wish­ing to drill must ‘‘ go through the ringer’’, in­cur­ring mil­lions of dol­lars in costs to get ap­proval from, suc­ces­sively, the En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency, the High Haz­ards Unit and the Mar­itime In­dus­try for a dis­charge man­age­ment plan.

In re­sponse to the in­quiries, Chevron Cor­po­ra­tion me­dia sent us links to a press re­lease an­nounc­ing the new ex­plo­ration per­mits.

It stated: ‘‘ Chevron’s ap­proach to this project will be guided by our com­mit­ment to main­tain the high­est en­vi­ron­men­tal and safety stan­dards.’’

The state­ment was ap­pended by a dis­claimer that Chevron uses lan­guage such as ‘‘ an­tic­i­pates, ex­pects, in­tends, tar­gets and forecasts’’, but that ‘‘th­ese are not guar­an­tees of fu­ture per­for­mance’’; and are sub­ject to cer­tain risks and uncer­tain­ties which are beyond the company’s con­trol and are dif­fi­cult to pre­dict.

Among the fac­tors that could cause ac­tual re­sults to dif­fer ma­te­ri­ally from those in the for­ward-look­ing state­ments are changes in prices of, de­mand for and sup­ply of crude oil.

It does not men­tion any en­vi­ron­men­tal fac­tors such as risk to the eco-sys­tem of a cat­a­strophic leak.

Lucky bounce: Fire­fight­ers dowse the en­gine of a car which over­turned in the Hun­dalee hills last Wed­nes­day.